Dr. Dan Kastner obtained his A.B. summa cum laude in philosophy from Princeton University in 1973 and a Ph.D. and M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine by 1982. After completing Internal Medicine residency and chief residency at Baylor, Dan moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1985. He served as Scientific Director of the Division of Intramural Research of the National Human Genome Research Institute from 2011 to 2021, and continues to maintain a busy lab in the Medical Genetics Branch. Throughout his career at the NIH, Dan's research has focused on using genetic and genomic strategies to understand inherited disorders of inflammation, often stimulated by patients with relatively rare disorders seen at the NIH Clinical Center hospital. This work has provided detailed molecular explanations for these illnesses, has provided the conceptual basis for highly effective targeted therapies, and has informed our understanding of more common illnesses. Dan's group also proposed the now widely accepted overarching concept of autoinflammatory disease to denote disorders of the evolutionarily ancient innate branch of the human immune system.
Dr. Kastner has won a number of awards and honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and to the National Academy of Medicine in 2012, recognition as Federal Employee of the Year in 2018, the Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine in 2019, and the Crafoord Prize in Polyarthritis in 2022.